In an attempt to show that B2B videos can be creative and fun, we’ve launched our own video series featuring interviews with online marketing specialists filmed in the back of a London Taxi Cab.
Called London PR Taxi, the video series covers a number of subject areas that make up what we call ‘new fashioned pr’ beginning with, in episode 1, an interview with Brian Storey – Creative Partner at Wand, discussing Viral Video techniques.
While the subject matter is serious, the context is far from it with coffee flying about as the cab, driven by a mad cabbie – nicknamed psycho Paul, swerves around London’s streets.
Episode 2, which discusses the place of media relations in 2011, ends with a cup of Starbucks coffee literally all over Gorakana’s Michael Davies (thanks Michael, you were a star).
An increasing number of companies are now reaping the benefits of adding social media to the marketing mix, but developing a social media strategy from scratch can be a daunting prospect.
Once implemented, effective social marketing offers the potential to richly engage with your audience, but the first step is thorough planning. We found a useful resource over at Clickz.com, so here follows six steps to developing a social media strategy:
1. Explore online conversations
Go online to determine your audience and what they are saying about your brand. Blogs are a great starting point, so consider using Technorati or Twitter’s search function to find where relevant subject matter is being discussed.
Take note of key influencers who drive online debates, and consider how their opinions and needs fit with your core value proposition.
2. Establish objectives
Think carefully about your goals, whether they be to drive traffic to your site, gain followers or simply boost your online brand presence.
Also be mindful of your audience’s needs and wants – the joy of social media marketing is that once you’ve offered something of value, you’ve earned the right to plug your brand a little. Cickz.com stresses the importance of getting the balance right here: think 90% valuable content to 10% self-promotion. More »
The majority of marketers plan to increase their spend on social media marketing this year, with a focus on Facebook marketing to drive ‘Likes’.
So found a poll of marketers from companies such as Bank of America and Colgate-Palmolive and advertising agency executives conducted by Effie Worldwide and Mashable this February.
Of those surveyed, a striking 70% plan to boost their social media budgets by more than 10% this year. Speaking on behalf of themselves and their clients, respondents forecast spending 11.9% of their overall marketing budgets on social networking, compared with 13% for television. These predictions do not necessarily tally with last year’s ad spend figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau, which showed that $68.7 billion was ploughed into TV advertising last year, compared with just $26 billion spent on online.
Interestingly, Twitter did not take centre stage in the findings, as Facebook marketing was a focus looking forwards. Much of the forecast budget increases will be allocated to attracting Facebook fans, which 35% of those polled cited as their main goal in 2011.
The study also revealed some other interesting findings. When asked to name those brands ‘effectively getting their message across via social media’, the big winners were Old Spice (cited by 15%), Pepsi (8%), Starbucks (7%) and Ford (6%). More »
Marked growth of the US online video advertising sector, currently worth $1bn, is set to continue over the next year, according to a major new report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).
Around 69% of advertisers and 55% of agencies plan to increase their online video advertising in the next 12 months, triggering a 22% increase in the market over the same period.
Healthy figures peppered the IAB’s results. One particularly bright finding is that those surveyed (namely 500 digital and/or television media decision makers that intend to spend $1 million or more in the next 12 months) envision spending 17% of overall digital marketing budgets on online video.
Respondents cited a number of factors influencing a move towards online video. High levels of consumer engagement ranked highly, as did the medium’s trackable nature and targeting capabilities. Many respondents favoured the low production costs of online video. Many are planning to shift ad dollars away from television in chase of better ROI, reaffirming the evolution, or should we say, revolution, in the allocation of marketing budgets. More »
Creating search engine optimised copy that flows successfully is a challenge that can make or break your campaign. So says Karon Thackston, writing for PromotionWorld.com, who has compiled a handy set of SEO tips to bear in mind when drafting copy.
Thackston argues that continuity between the initial trigger (be it an ad, banner or tweet) through to the landing page is vital. This means using consistent keyphrases and seamlessly flowing copy.
Anything less will confuse potentially interested prospects, who may well drop off before even visiting your site.
The basis of writing organic SEO copy is to develop and follow the same topic from a prospect’s first exposure to your site to the call-to-action on the webpage. Thackston advises thinking of your tag sets as links in a chain, ushering the prospect from one step to the next.
“It should – in essence – work exactly like the process when writing a paid ad/landing page combo,” she says.
The next step is, ironically, to stop. Before writing, walk the exact path your prospects will walk. More »
Insurance giant Aviva is trying a new online strategy, which will see the brand highlighting positive customer comments in social media.
Using a service provided by feedback reporting provider Service Tick, customers that have given positive feedback scores following online transactions will be given the option to post comments on social networking sites. Glowing comments can be easily linked through to Facebook and Twitter, where they will generate special promotional offers.
It’s an interesting strategy, especially as only the relatively limited audience of an individual’s social network will see the offers.
According to Service Tick, one of the unique properties of its Social Advocate service is that it operates in real time – prompting customers to comment at the precise moment when they’re feeling warm towards a brand.
“In the past, we’ve seen attempts by organisations to get their marketing messaging out to customers via the social networks, but consumers see straight through them as it’s not what the networks are about. At best, the campaigns simply fail – at worst, they can damage a brand,” said Kevin Goodings, managing director at ServiceTick. More »
Intel’s new action adventure mini-movie “Chase” is straight in at number one, in the AdAge viral video chart ahead of established favourites such as Evian and Blendtec.
The ad by San Francisco agency Venables Bell & Partners and directed by London-based duo, Smith & Foulkes (Honda “Grrr” and Coca-Cola “Videogame”), is an action-adventure chase sequence in a desktop multi-window environment.
The heroine is pursued by two bad guys through a range of computer applications from iTunes and Adobe Creative Suite to Facebook and more, demonstrating the performance capabilities of Intel’s new Core i5 processors.
The video now stands at almost 2 million views on YouTube – the growth curve of the original (of the seven different videos for the campaign), indicates a spike on Jan 18, which according to AdAge, usually indicates paid promotion, although Intel claims the surge was organic, due to blog coverage.
LinkedIn announced on their blog yesterday that video sharing is now available on their site, which is great, but the festive video card they’ve invited us to share in celebration seems, well just a bit sinister:
You may have 10,000 happy customers but it only takes one motivated, IT literate one to turn feral and as generation Y matures, there’s only going to be more of them.
Assuming the website is legitimate and can’t be taken down through legal means – or negotiated with, there is still something you can you do.
The main issue is stopping negative sites appearing directly under your main brand site in Google search results. SEO focused content creation can push the offending site far away enough from the main search results to have little associative impact on your brand.
Adding content about your brand is a good thing to do in any case, not just building a bulwark against attacks but establishing the brand as a thought leader in their respective field and providing material for social media marketing.
In that sense, the famous phrase ‘publish and be damned’ perhaps needs reversing for the online world – ‘publish or be damned.’
In our daily noodling on Facebook, we don’t have the sense that we’re writing our personal history – but think ahead fifty years and our Facebook profile may end up as the ultimate story of our lives – as depicted in this excellent film from Maxime Luere of Akama Studio.
In an attempt to show that B2B videos can be creative and fun, we’ve launched our own video series featuring interviews with online marketing specialists filmed in the back of a London Taxi Cab.
The majority of marketers plan to increase their spend on
As 